Don’t Isolate Ukraine, and Watch Those Neo-Fascists

Oct. 31 (Bloomberg) -- Ukraine this week held a deeply
flawed election, in which the main opposition leader was jailed
and the biggest gains went to a party of neo-fascists, who
appear to have won 10 percent of the vote. For a country that
eight years ago staged an inspiring uprising to overturn a
stolen election, it’s hard to imagine a more depressing outcome.

The breakthrough by Svoboda, an extreme-right-wing party
from the nation’s Ukrainian-speaking west, is just another sign
that all is not well in this divided country. Before the Oct. 28
election, Ukraine was already being shut out by the European
Union over its democratic failures and pressured by Russia to
join a customs union with Belarus and Kazakhstan instead. Now
neo-fascists will take their seats in parliament.

But here is why Ukraine is so difficult to read and handle,
for all of its neighbors. To start with, Svoboda (which
translates as Freedom), must be Europe’s only neo-fascists who
are also pro-EU. Meanwhile, Yulia Tymoshenko, the jailed heroine
of the 2004 Orange Revolution, says the EU is wrong to punish
Ukraine for her treatment by freezing its association agreement
with the bloc. And the supposedly pro-Russian President Viktor
Yanukovych doesn’t even want to join Russia’s customs union, if
he can avoid it.

Widening Fissures

Svoboda’s success and Yanukovych’s behavior are troubling.
But for the EU and the U.S. alike, the priority should be to
avoid widening the fissures between the Ukrainian-speaking west
and Russian-speaking east, or driving the government into the
arms of Vladimir Putin, Russia’s President.

Svoboda has cleaned up its act. In 2004 it changed its name
from the Social-Nationalist Party and dropped a Swastika-like
emblem. Still, much of its appeal lies in hardcore ethnic-Ukrainian nationalism and a hatred of Poles, Russians, Jews and
gays. These have deep roots in Ukraine’s history and should give
pause.

Svoboda’s leaders glorify those Western Ukrainians who
welcomed the Nazis in 1941, seeing the Germans as potential
liberators from Soviet rule. Those same Ukrainians also
collaborated in the widespread murder of Jews and Poles. As in
the Baltic states, there is a sharp division here over how to
interpret the motives of those who worked with the Nazis and how
they should be remembered today.

What the election result shows is a growing risk that
disenchanted voters will again mix up Ukrainian nationalism with
xenophobia. Svoboda, led by Oleh Tiahnybok, supported the 2004
Orange Revolution. It was later expelled from the group
surrounding former president Viktor Yushchenko, when Tiahnybok
made a speech saying that Ukraine was ruled by a “Moscow-Jewish
mafia.” It was not the only speech he made that was loaded with
this sort of language.

Tiahnybok has said that while he does not regret using
those words, he was misinterpreted. He also says his party is
neither xenophobic nor anti-Semitic. In any case, for Svoboda’s
supporters, Russophobia remains the party’s main attraction. All
votes have not yet been counted, but the party looks set to win
about 33 of the Rada’s 450 seats.

On election day, while on a trip to Ukraine organized by
the German Marshall Fund, I went to Irpin, a small town outside
Kiev. There I met Sergeii, a 48-year-old musician, who didn’t
give his full name because he was at a polling station. He told
me he had voted for Svoboda because he wanted “Ukraine to be a
powerful country, and if we have to choose between Europe and
Russia it is Europe for us. Russia is Asia and I don’t trust
Asians.”

Bedrock Support

The party presents itself as the only one that wants a
“Ukraine for Ukrainians,” and not for the ethnic Russians who
make up 17.3 percent of the population and who live mostly in
the east. Ethnic Russians form the bedrock of support for the
ruling Party of the Regions, but many more are simply Russian
speakers who switch happily between the two Slavic languages,
depending on the circumstance.

In July, the Party of the Regions pushed through a
controversial language law that, while dressed up as protection
for minority languages, was intended to bolster the use of
Russian and probably a first step to making it an official state
language, along with Ukrainian. Most probably Yanukovych
believed this would help garner support in his eastern
heartland.

In reality, the status of Russian is not an important issue
for most Ukrainians, who can speak it freely. Instead of gaining
votes in the east, the net result of the language law probably
was to push some nationalist voters -- especially in the west --
into the arms of Svoboda, entrenching the country’s historical
divisions.

Svoboda activists also have the advantage of being seen as
conviction politicians, in a country where there is now a
widespread belief that pretty much all of the current
establishment leaders are only out for what they can get for
themselves. Like fringe parties around Europe in recent years,
they have gained from a protest vote.

How important a political role Svoboda will be able to play
now that the party is in parliament is unclear. Vitali
Klitschko, the reigning champion of the World Boxing Council,
who also heads what looks set to become parliament’s third
largest party, UDAR, says he’ll work with Svoboda, but will have
nothing to do with its radical nationalist policies.
Tymoshenko’s Fatherland, which remains the second-largest party,
has already signed a cooperation agreement with Svoboda. Many in
the Ukrainian opposition believe that time is taming the neo-fascists, and that its leader is on the same course as that
taken by Gianfranco Fini, the Italian politician who over a
period of years moved to the respectable end of the country’s
right-wing politics.

Toughest Line

It’s the ruling party that’s taking the toughest line on
Svoboda. Oleg Voloshyn, the foreign ministry spokesman who
echoes the views of the Party of the Regions, condemned the
opposition “for inviting an openly anti-Semitic party to join
them.” He says that the party is toning down its extremist
language because it does not want to scare off too many voters.
Hitler did the same, he said, in his quest for votes in the
1930s.

Svoboda needs to be watched and Yanukovych’s anti-democratic behavior needs to be discouraged. But the EU’s
association process should also be resumed. It’s a way to tie
Ukraine into the West and its institutions -- however much they
are in trouble today -- and that’s why Tymoshenko supports it
from her cell. Too much is at stake to isolate Ukraine.

(Tim Judah is an author and journalist. He writes about
foreign affairs and covers the Balkans for the Economist. The
opinions expressed are his own.)

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